Poetry Riot A Slam Plus (& Minus!)
To Slam or Not to Slam
Date: Saturday December 04
Time: Noon - 2:00
Place: Regis Center for Art - Atrium
Grab lunch from the Left Bank Cafe and a seat in the sunny Regis Center
Atrium
Hosted by Bob Holman and EG
Bailey
Organized by Maria Damon
Participants: (listed alphabetically)
Falon Bochniak
Krista Burton
Erin Card
Maria Damon
Thomas Sayres Ellis
Katherine Friedli
Stephen Healey
Wendy Jones
Eiranne Lorsung
Maggie Majewski
Michael Medrano
Rachel Moritz
Toussaint Morrison
Mark Nowak
Kara Olson
Theo Osemeka
Mike Rollin
Becky Weaver
Shanna Youngdahl
Participation Information (download .pdf)
Non-slammers: Sign on up for the "Open Mic" session
Slammers: 4-person teams MUST have a group poem and will
"compete" in a special category!
Big Prizes!!!!
To pre-register contact damon001@umn.edu. At least One Lucky Poet will be
drawn from a hat the day of, and if there are other spaces available they
too will be hat-drawn.
Teams from writing communities across the Twin Cities will "compete"/perform in a special genre, the slam, which arose out of a meeting of the populist conviction that poetry is everywhere with aesthetic sensibilities from the gamut: high lyric, hip hop, grassroots political public poetry, New York school in-the-moment fly-by-night piquancy, inspired lunacy, etc.- all spun into a mock contest designed to put these poetries and poets in relation to each other rather than simply a serial presentation of one after the other, the "open reading" format. A slam forces relationship, creating unexpected juxtapositions that re-energize art through a commitment to the performative, the communitarian, the carnivalesque.
Participants will include local poets from communities such as the Loft, SASE, Minnesota Spoken Word Association, U of M's Creative Writing Program, as well as mavericks and independent operators. A good time will be had by all.
Participants:
Biographies:
EJ Bailey, Minnesota Spoken Word Association
Bibliography
Curriculum Vitae (download .pdf)
Bob Holman, Poet and Educator
Recently dubbed a member of the "Poetry Pantheon" by the New York Times Magazine and featured in a Henry Louis Gates, Jr. profile in The New Yorker, Holman has previously been crowned "Ringmaster of the Spoken Word" (New York Daily News), "Poetry Czar" (Village Voice), "Dean of the Scene" (Seventeen), and "this generation's Ezra Pound," (San Francisco's Poetry Flash).
From Slam to hip hop, from performance poetry to spoken word, Bob Holman has been a central figure in the reemergence of poetry in our culture. The series he produced for PBS, the United States of Poetry, features over sixty poets including Derek Walcott, Rita Dove, Czeslaw Milosz, Lou Reed and former President Jimmy Carter, as well as rappers, cowboy poets, American Sign Language poets, and Slammers. USOP lives on as an anthology from Harry Abrams Publishers (in its second printing), a home video from KQED, and soundtrack CD from Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, a label Holman co-founded. He has appeared widely on TV: "Nightline," "Good Morning America," "ABC News Magazine," MTV's "Spoken Word Unplugged," and "The Charlie Rose Show," among others. The NEA has announced major preproduction support for his new poetry media project, the World of Poetry (worldofpoetry.org), the world's first digital poetry anthology.
Holman's latest collection of poems, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, was published in 2003 by Art of This Century/Pace Editions, and was launched at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum during the Venice Biennale. The book consists of twenty daguerreotypes by Chuck Close and twenty praise poems by Holman, one for each of the artists Close photographed. Tin Fish published his translations (from Chinese, with the author) of Zhang Er's Carved Water, also in 1993. His selected works, The Collect Call of the Wild, from Henry Holt, was proclaimed "the first poetic drop-kick into the new millennium" by Next magazine and "Impressive (to say the least)" by Robert Creeley. He co-edited Aloud! Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (also from Holt), winner of the American Book Award, after having helped reopen the Cafe in 1989 and where he ran the infamous Poetry Slams through 1996. Holman's first CD, In With The Out Crowd, was produced by needle-drop wizard Hal Willner. Backed by Chris Spedding, Wayne Kramer, and Bobby Neuwirth, the album moves from rock to country to ballad, shot through with urgent humor and what can only be called "poetry." Lou Reed says it is "an astonishing achievement."
Selected recent career highlights:
- 2003-ongoing visiting professor of writing, Columbia University School of the Arts
- 2001-ongoing proprietor, Bowery Poetry Club
Books written/edited by
- A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, a collaboration with Chuck Close, Art of this Century/Pace Editions, 2003
- Carved Water, poems by Zhang Er, translated Holman, Tinfish, 2003
- Beach Simplifies Horizon, drawings by Bob Moskowitz, The Grenfell Press: NY, 1998.
- The United States of Poetry, an anthology co-edited and with an introduction by, accompanying the Public Television series, Abrams: NY, March, 1996.
Anthologies (Selected List)
- Bum Rush the Page ed. Medina Rivera, MTV/Penguin, 2002
- Short Fuse: Global Anthology ed. Swift & Norton, Rattapallax, 2002
- Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance, ed. Glazner, Manic D, 2000.
- Thus Spake the Corpse: Exquisite Corpse Reader, ed. Codrescu, Black Sparrow, 1999.
Awards (Selected List)
- Zebra Poetry Film Festival, US selection, 2004
- Downtown Short Film Festival, selected screening, 2003
- Poets & Writers Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, 2003
- First International Poetry Film Festival, "Bob Holman Special," Berlin, 2002
- National Arts Award, Anderson Ranch, 2002
- Curbstone Press, "Honored Poet Award," 2000.
- National Poetry Slam Championship, Mouth Almighty Team coach, 1997-98.
- Sundance Film Festival, 1996.
Education:
Columbia College, AB, English, 1970. (Studied with Kenneth Koch, Eric Bentley,
Michael Goldman, Michael Wood.)
St. Marks Poetry Project, 1974-78. (Studied with Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley,
Bernadette Mayer)